Prayer at a Locked Door: An Absence that Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

At the back of Drum Castle, amongst the trees, is the private chapel. It is small and old, secluded and quiet, and is reached by climbing a gentle sancta scala. 

On a winter morning of diluted sunlight, the steps softened with autumn leaves, I walked up to the door and stood outside the sacred space dedicated to prayer and worship.

Anticipating a few moments of being enclosed in a place "where prayer is valid" I turned the handle and pushed.

The door was locked, itself a metaphor for those prayers that go unanswered, maybe even unheard.

On this occasion, the locked door disconcerted and then dissolved the intention to stop, sit, reflect, and see what happens when God is given a chance to get a word in edgeways. 

Momentary disappointment. 

Then I started doing the spiritual equivalent of lateral thinking. Why should a closed door get in the way of awareness, attention and contemplation?

Isn't it part of the mystery of God that we experience God as a Presence who is sometimes absent, and an Absence which makes us yearn for presence?

True enough, prayer becomes faithful communion through trust in the One who comes, and to Whom we come. 

But isn't it also true that faith may require we sometimes experience the absence of the One who promised never to leave or forsake, and to be with us to the ends of the earth and the end of time.

Otherwise we take grace for granted.

Standing in the wood, outside a locked chapel door, is an education in such faithful trust, an exercise in the discipline of believing without seeing, a determined communing with a promised Presence without the warm feelings of reassurance. A refusal to take grace for granted.

There is a process of deepening and recovery for the soul best described in the metaphor of winter.  The winter shutdown of the natural world is a time of minimal output, a yielding to slow replenishment, a stripping away of what was last year's foliage, a time of minimal sunlight, low temperatures, and nothing discernible happening. But along with the shutdown, the promise of Spring.

Perhaps now and then, we need the winter season. Only then do we undergo the ascetic pruning back of what is no longer fruitful, the forced slowing down as energy sources reduce output, the inner soil broken down by the rhythms of frost and thaw, and enriched by rotting leaves and the gift og humus.

In other words a closed door is just another kind of gift, a different facet of grace, an absence that makes the heart grow fonder. 

 

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[John Rackley]

A sleepless night wandering around some blogs found this mid winter gem with gratitude. How right to speak of wintry grace in the midst of Advent-time; lest the roar of shouted carols further burden the lonely believer with shame. For it is in letting go what we may think we believe that space is created for new encounter. Thwarted faith is the dark soil in which a new searching may begin for the soft glow of a winter dawn.
Some blogs need to be read at the same hour of their writing